this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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Luigi Mangione
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Let's say that Mangione committed the crime.
My understanding is that he gave cops a fake ID when they questioned him on reasonable suspicion (the basis of which was a tip from an employee). That is something that yes, he can be arrested for. And he can be personally searched after that arrest. But at that point, he can no longer get a gun out of his bag, and cops have control of it, so he can't destroy evidence/get a weapon from it; so searching the bag should be out at that time. So, my understanding, based on case law, is that they would have needed a warrant to search it at that time, as the contents of the bag aren't related to the reason he's been arrested. You aren't supposed to be able to use a pretextural arrest to search a person's car or belongings (e.g., arrest you for suspicion of drunk driving, then search your car to find evidence of burglaries).
In theory, without the warrant, the search and everything from the search should be out. Even if he committed the crime, and kept all the evidence conveniently in his backpack, it should be completely excluded from the case. I'm sure that the DA is going to argue that there's some exception that allows a warrantless search, but I can't say what that argument will be. If the evidence is allowed in, his defense attorney is going to have to object every single time that prosecutors refer to it, for any reason, in order to preserve the option to claim that evidence was improperly admitted in an appeal. (Which they should absolutely do, if it goes that far!)
Federal rules of evidence is pretty complicated stuff. But goddamn, does it look like someone fucked up bad on a really high profile case.
Yeah, he conveniently carried around a disposable weapon used in a murder that he was wanted for, instead of disposing of it. Also he conveniently wrote a manifesto related to the murder and carried that around in his backpack as well.
Nothing suspicious here. Move along.
Not a manifesto. Manifestos are published by the author. We have no way of knowing who authored that police officer's fever dream, but since the police published it, it wasn't written by Luigi. Also the language and grammar are consistent with the lack of education that cops receive, not the level of education that Luigi received.
They called it a manifesto, which is why I used the term. If it's real, he was basically just carrying around a written confession in his backpack just to make the cops' jobs easier, I guess.
Fair nuff
Just because someone has a college degree doesn't mean that they can write for shit.
He had reddit and Goodreads profiles, where he left comments and book reviews which might be used to judge his writing style (also his own handwriting may be analysed, comparing it to that of the manifesto). Although the "manifesto" is very short so maybe not enough language treaits could be extrapolated from it.
Printed guns aren't "disposable"; they're untraceable. A printed firearm can function for tens of thousands of rounds, and is not necessarily any less accurate than any other polymer firearm.
If he never expected to even make it out of NYC, carrying that stuff kinda makes sense. But I def. would have dumped everything in the Hudson river.
It's disposable in the sense that it costs basically nothing to make and can easily be disposed of if you need to. A bit of heat and it's no longer a gun, and nobody would know that it ever was.
Also no. If I, for instance, want to print a Glock, the only part that I'm printing is the polymer frame (which, legally, is the gun). I still need to buy a slide, slide stop, guide rod, recoil spring (IDK off the top of my head if Glock uses a captured spring or not), barrel, trigger & associated parts, magazine catch and release, etc. Oh, and I'll need to buy magazines, or at least a magazine spring if I'm able to print the magazine, baseplate, and follower. While I don't particularly want to price them all out right now, more often than not buying parts is more expensive than buying a completed firearm. Right now I can pick up a Glock G17 gen 5 MOS for about $475 (after shipping and transfer fee); if I save anything with printing, the savings are going to be small
The biggest advantage to a printed gun is that all of the other parts can be purchased with cash, and without a background check, so there's no record that you ever purchased the firearm.
You're still going to be left with the metal parts. OTOH, they have no serial numbers, so they're functionally impossible to trace. Also, any polymer gun can either be melted or incinerated.
Keep in mind that you can also print silencers now. The big advantage to that is that, if you don't mind violating the National Firearms Act of 1934, you don't have to send your fingerprints to the BATF or pay $200 for a tax stamp. They don't last as long as inconel or titanium silencers though.
Look, I'm 100% in favor of people printing guns. Or buying 80% receivers/frames, and fabricating their own. Or, hell, buying a Haas desktop minimill and learning CNC programming to make gun parts out of metal. But most of the time you're going to end up spending more to make one than to buy one.
This is something they could very easily forget, or just never learned, because they usually fuck up the poor and colored and press them into plea deals so it never goes to trial so it never becomes apparent the police have nothing since they ignored all the laws, i imagine when u spend a good amount of your career cheating the justice system you forget there were ever rules to begin with.
Part of me is leaning towards Luigi being the guy and he planned on getting arrested with this 'too good to be true' evidence in this little known PA town, because he was banking on them bungling it and he knew he would have a good legal team making it seem planted, or at the least have widespread public support if he did get charged.
If I was the kind of person that would commit a high-profile assassination, that is not something I'd want to bet my life and freedom on.
Pretty sure you're wrong, specifically in that a search incident to arrest doesn't have lines in the sand about which crime you're being arrested for.
Good point, they don't even need a crime to arrest you.
This is how people end up with their only charge being "resisting arrest".
Search incident to arrest typically allows you to search the person of the suspect to ensure that the person doesn't have a weapon, or has evidence of a crime that they can destroy. Once you've separated a person from a closed bag, you don't have the immediate right to search the bag; US v. Chadwick, 433 U.S. 1 (1977). OTOH, once an arrestee is actually being booked, they can perform an inventory of the contents of a bag (Illinois v. LaFayette, 462 U.S. 640 (1983)), which would have turned up the gun, etc., and it would have turned them up under controlled circumstances. But that's not what happened here; he appears to have been arrested on a pretextual basis, and then his bag seized and searched without a warrant. However, it's going to be up to his attorneys to make this argument, and my guess is that the state will argue that he was definitely, 100% going to be booked--despite the lack of evidence at that point to support that--and thus it was inevitable that the gun would have been found. I think that's bullshit, but we'll see.
Off topic but I really like your name
Not a lawyer, but I know that when a cop arrests someone in a car and the car is impounded, they catalog items. This is an unofficial search to make sure they aren't liable for missing items. I would expect the same of a backpack. But perhaps that falls under the same disqualification of use as evidence you're suggesting.
That's called an "inventory search", and this motion says what happened isn't an "inventory search" because they didn't follow procedure (and cites supporting precedence).
If they would have just hauled him in for processing on the false identification, and then found the gun during an inventory search at the station, it would be better for the prosecution.
The motion also claims that the search couldn't be a... safety search? (I don't know the right term)... like checking a person for weapons, because before the search was initiated, the suspect was already handcuffed and separated from the backpack so didn't have access to anything in it that could be hazardous to the officers. Prosecution might argue is was a safety search because they were looking for a hazard that didn't need to be triggered by the suspect, like a timed device or just an incidental hazard.
IANAL, just an interested citizen.
You're thinking of a Terry stop.
That would be the exigent circumstances exception, but you need more than just an assertion for that; you need a rational basis for claiming exigent circumstances.
Under Illinois v. Lafayette, 462 U.S. 640 (1983), it would be fine to inventory a bag when you're being booked. But they hadn't gotten that far, and I'm not aware of any evidence that they would have actually booked him without the contents of the bag.
Also, AFAIK, they're allowed to do a basic search to ensure that someone doesn't have a weapon on them or nearby. It wouldn't make sense to require a warrant for that. Imagine a cop had to apply for a search warrant to ensure that the person they were arresting didn't have a knife or gun in their pocket.
In that case, it might make sense to search his backpack if it was right next to him. OTOH, if they took his backpack away from him, then they were no longer in danger from anything in the backpack so they had no justification to search it.
You just know that the police are going to lie about these things. They'll claim he was never separated from his backpack so they were justified in searching it for something dangerous. Or they'll claim that they had reason to believe there was a bomb so even though he didn't have it on him, they still had a reason to search it because it still posed an immediate danger.
The only way anybody can get a fair trial is to have an expensive team of lawyers who can chase down all these various lies, finding out what was said on body cams, when the body cams were mysteriously turned off, what the exact timeline of everything was, etc.